Pithy

VorJack over at Unreasonable Faith linked to my first official Byzantine Logic post.  Over the course of setting the stage for the quote in question, VorJack came up with a quote that I, in turn, absolutely want to steal.  Erm, borrow.  With full credit given:

Like all good historians, he realizes that to talk about a period of history, he has to go back to well before that period actually began. Back to, say, when the universe cooled enough for protons to form.

To be fair, for some things you only really need to go as far back as the emergence of the first single-celled organism...